Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution
Reflections on the Anthology and on Activism in the Arts
I have been thinking for a time of what I’m about to say from an outsider’s perspective. Well, the world is small enough to make all of us insiders.
This is another insider’s perspective.
Iran is on the other side of the world. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a little bit closer to us here in Canada, and if anyone here has been transfixed by the war in Ukraine, they will most likely know that Russia uses Iranian drones against Ukraine’s cities. Similarly, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard army has sent thousands of Syrian refugees our way with the part it played in viciously suppressing the uprising against Syria’s dictator.
If Canadian citizens can’t always count on their safety in China, as we saw with the imprisonment of the two Michaels, Canadians also can’t count on being safe in Iran, where twenty years ago the journalist Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian citizen, was tortured to death in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
There’s all that to ruminate on at a time like this, and there’s also the simple reality that women’s rights are human rights. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate spoke here in Toronto in September 2023. This was Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman.[1] She was a judge in Tehran before the Islamic Republic swept her and other women off the bench. So she resumed her career as a human rights lawyer, and she’s now forced to live in exile. What Shirin Ebadi told her Toronto audience was that democracy in Iran would come in through the gate of women’s rights.
We can no longer imagine a working democratic government anywhere on earth where one-half of the population are second-class citizens and all leadership positions are reserved by law and custom for men alone. And we can’t imagine a benevolent, humane, or even workable society that marginalizes its women.
Put simply, it has been 44 years since the revolution that led to the Islamic Republic, and a large part of Iran’s population has had enough. We would say that the regime has lost its legitimacy: its aims and ideals no longer ring true for the people, and its systems and methods don’t serve any desirable purpose for them. You can compare this disillusionment and frustration with the level of alienation the populations of Eastern Europe felt towards their own governments before the Berlin Wall fell.
But a government that has lost its legitimacy can still carry on if it has cold steel in its heart.
Over the years there have been periodic waves of protests in Iran. Many of these were quashed with rivers of blood, sometimes targeting the country’s minorities for special violence. The protestors complained about things like the government raising prices of necessities, or the national election commission falsifying the count in the presidential election. Yet it took one atrocity against a single woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, to spark the revolution (no mere protest) happening now, which is a call for an end to the system, not for its reform.
The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran and by their supporters outside Iran is now recognized worldwide: Woman, Life, Freedom. It encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. The poetry anthology we are publicizing and supporting aims to echo the cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and to spread it.
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Bänoo Zan and I, the anthology’s editors, invite all poets everywhere who take inspiration from this slogan to contribute poems. We will read the submissions blind—that is, anonymously—to select the best ones to publish.
We are assembling this anthology to mark a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. In Iran, poetry is a national treasure; imagine a culture that has six Shakespeares (or more), in terms of the poets’ stature and people’s familiarity with their lines. Amid human societies everywhere, words that are spoken may be forgotten, books of essays may lie unopened on the shelf, but lines of poetry live and speak forever.
Bänoo and I are eager to discover new voices. We hope that the international contributors to the anthology will become a virtual community, and that their interest will be transformed into activism. We aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and demonstrate to the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down.
An Anthem
The Iranian revolution that began in September 2022 responded to no political manifesto. Instead, it flared up in response to an unforgettable line of people’s poetry: the slogan Zan, Zandeghi, Azadi! This is what the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” sounds like in Persian. In Kurdish, the language in which this slogan was first spoken, it goes Jin, Jiyan, Azadî!
Within days, the revolution also found its anthem. Amidst Persian-language reworkings of the World War II partisan song, “Bella Ciao” (which kept its wildly incongruous Italian refrain), and the 1970s’ insurgent chant, “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido,” a string of found poetry began to sound out in Iran, artfully arranged and set to music by singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour. The people in the streets quickly taught themselves to sing this winding melody, which begins as a murmur but gathers force until a last intake of breath pushes out the words Azadi! Azadi! (Freedom!).
Hajipour assembled the words to this song, which he called “Baraye,” from people’s tweets. Some of these were political slogans, some were complaints, some were sweet dreams: “For a dance in the alley . . . For the dreams of the dumpster kids . . . For the jailed beautiful minds . . . For the tranquilizers and insomnia.” The title, “Baraye,” means “for the sake of.” The song is said to have gained 40 million views in 48 hours, and it earned Hajipour six days in prison with the promise of more to come.[2] In February 2023 “Baraye” also earned the first ever Grammy awarded for the best song for social change.
Bänoo and I are looking for poems that themselves somehow join in the struggle for social and political change being waged by the women of Iran, not unlike Servin Hajipour’s creation. We hope that these will be voices that call back and forth across uneasy borders to proclaim transnational solidarity.
The Role of Poetry in Iran
The link between poetry and struggle is nothing new in Iran.
Here is the English title of a political poem that was put to music early in the 20th century: “Tulips Bloom from Youths’ Blood.” Aref Qazvini (1882–1934) composed it to salvage shreds of hope from the wreckage of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, a series of events extending from 1905 to 1911. The poem’s stanzas are a litany of desolate landscapes and desolate souls, including the poet’s own.
The following are lines taken from Bänoo Zan’s translation from the Persian[3]:
Tulips have bloomed from the blood of the youths of our land
Lamenting those cypresses, Cypress can no longer stand
A mourning nightingale creeps under Rose’s shadow
And Rose, like me, has torn her robe in sorrow
And the refrain:
How vicious are you, Heaven!
You’re headed to vengeance, O Heaven!
You have no faith
You have no creed—no creed
O Heaven!
But note the image that Qazvini leaves us with: “the tulips are in bloom.”
On a late September day in 2023, on the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s murder, hundreds of marchers assembled in downtown Toronto, carrying posters with the photos of dead Iranian protestors against a white background. Red droplets showed against the white, and as they fell, these drops of blood sprang up as stylized red tulips in the lower register of the poster. The words of Qazvini’s poem have arced over more than a century and returned in 2023 as a visual on a series of protest posters.
The chants and slogans called out on the streets and in the squares of Iran and across the globe are themselves a kind of poetry of the masses. In the heat of the struggle, they motivate activists, transmit information, proclaim solidarity—and construct solidarity where it used to be hard to find. We can call these chants an artistic performance of revolt.
Let’s reflect on this. The subtitle of this anthology is “Poems for the Iranian Revolution.” We need to ask ourselves what we mean by “poems for a revolution.”
We sent out our call hoping to bring in poems that spring out of the present moment. We expect to find denunciations of injustice, laments for the fallen, and bitter curses. We expect prayers, examinations of a poet’s own conscience, celebrations of life, lyrical musings, autobiographical fragments, and visions of a better future.
We want this collection to uncover the dimensions of the Iranian revolution and the meaning it has for the people of Iran, and the whole world. We want this to be a book in the shape of a revolution.
But what does a book of poems do “for” a revolution? Does it stand up and participate? Does it mark the occasion? Bear witness? Lend a hand? The answer is that its best, an anthology like this brings together a community of creators and readers whose support for the revolution goes beyond the borders of Iran. To reiterate, this is the world’s first feminist revolution, and it’s a beacon for the human race. Perhaps one of the poems we select will speak to people reading it a hundred years from now.
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Let us remember that we are fortunate in that we can publish these poems and speak them freely here where we are assembling this anthology. There are lands and languages in which the poems would be suppressed and the poets punished. By publishing these poems in English, regardless of where or in whichever language they were composed, we intend them to reach an international audience and encourage activists around the world.
No one questions the power of the word. Dictators and oppressors of all kinds fear and despise it.
We want the selections in this anthology to be poems that trouble oppressors. We are looking for poems that breathe freely and speak their mind without fear.
Call for Assistance
Guernica Editions has agreed to publish this anthology. They have accepted to open submissions to the international community of poets. However, this international focus means that Guernica expects to lose the opportunity to receive government credits and Canadian content cultural grants for this title; it’s the kind of financial support that Canada’s small independent publishers depend on. Beyond printing and promotion, the costs of publishing this book would fall on Bänoo and me as co-editors. We would have to cover costs from the calligraphy to be incorporated into the cover art, the honorariums to contributors, and even the postage to mail them their copies.
That is why we have opened a GoFundMe account, which you can reach through Guernica Editions’ submissions web page, as well as directly here: Fundraiser for Cy Strom by Bänoo Zan: Woman Life Freedom Anthology (gofundme.com). We thank all our volunteers and participants.
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At the first couple of marches we attended in Edmonton last year, where Bänoo was the University of Alberta’s Writer-in-Residence, the crowd wasn’t yet used to the call-and-response chanting of the typical protest rally. The responses, and even the calls, were pretty ragged, whether in Persian or in English. Finally, one of the rally organizers came out with a simple chant—just three words. One word, actually, repeated in rhythmic triplets. The organizer stamped his right foot in the dirt as he led this chant. It’s the Persian word for “freedom,” repeated three times. It goes like this: Azadi Azadi Azadi …
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Link to submissions and GoFundMe campaign: Submissions – Guernica Editions
What kind of poems are we looking for? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-kind-poems-we-looking-b%C3%A4noo-zan
Article in Asymptote journal (January 4, 2024): https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2024/01/04/poetry-and-resistance-in-iran/#more-33317
Shab-e She’r Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ShabeSherTO
Link to the series of protest posters discussed in the talk: https://linktr.ee/diasporairan
NOTES
[1]In October 2023, Narges Mohammadi, another Iranian woman, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In the words of the Nobel committee, she was recognized “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” The Iranian High Council for Human Rights condemned the committee for awarding the prize to “a criminal.” Mohammadi is serving a long sentence in Tehran’s Evin Prison. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narges_Mohammadi.
[2] And it came. See https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/01/middleeast/shervin-hajipour-iran-jail-intl/index.html.
[3] Tulips Bloom from Youths’ Blood | Poetry In Voice.
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Cy Strom works professionally as an editor. He holds MA and MPhil degrees from Columbia University in early modern European history and has published in academic and other areas, including a chapter in the dazzling art monograph Oscar Cahén. He edits in different genres and sometimes languages, and has had a role in developing professional editorial standards and educational materials. A draughtsman and painter, for years he ran a drop-in session at an art studio. Cy and Iranian-born poet Bänoo Zan are co-editors of the forthcoming poetry anthology Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (Guernica Editions, Canada).
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